


Anna Hart's Letters

by CenozoicSynapsid



Category: The Bone Key - Sarah Monette
Genre: Gen, Lost Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-05
Updated: 2015-12-05
Packaged: 2018-05-05 03:27:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5359406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CenozoicSynapsid/pseuds/CenozoicSynapsid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Old love letters can still be compelling reading. Unfortunately.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anna Hart's Letters

**Author's Note:**

  * For [soupytwist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/soupytwist/gifts).



> Booth's article on William Burwell's papers "Letters and Journals of the War in the Phillipines, with notes on the Mangkukulam or Enchanters", appeared in an early volume of American Historical Review. "Anna Hart's Letters" appears to have been written at around the same time, and the Harts to be a fictionalized version of the Burwells, although the historical record contains no trace of the scandal Booth describes. Several candidates have been put forward for "the historian C. R. Ellicott". Damian Taylor's identification of her with Lydia Barnes Hill, biographer of Joshua Chamberlain, fits chronologically, although Hill's style does not fit Booth's description particularly well. In a newly-published article, Cheryl Yu suggests that Ellicott is based on Sybil Cassingham, whose never-published "Justinian and Theodora" was recently discovered in manuscript form in the Parrington archives. If so, Booth's vision of her as a happily independent historian represents a fantasy of self-reliance to which he may have aspired in his own life.  
>   
> Dr. L. Marie Howard, MSLIS, PhD  
> Senior Archivist, Department of Rare Books  
> Samuel Mather Parrington Museum

The letter had been part of Edmund Hart’s estate, but I could see at once that he had not written it. I had grown quite accustomed to Colonel Hart’s sharp-angled scrawl; he could never have produced this crisp, feminine miniscule. The first page of it was enough to convince me he had never read it, either--- if he had, he would not have filed it with the haphazard miscellany of notes and sketches in which I found it. At a guess, he would have burnt it. It was a letter of love, and, though couched in the elegant indirection of the previous century, it was nonetheless quite concretely physical.

The salutation read only “Dearest,” but since the remaining material in the box had belonged to the Colonel’s daughter Anna, I was confident in conjecturing it must have been addressed to her. As I sorted through the carelessly packed papers, I recalled the notes I had made the week before on the Colonel and his family: she had died in a boating accident, the year I was born, at the age of seventeen.

Of Colonel Hart’s bequest to the Parrington, only the Phillipines material was of any scholarly interest, and I had catalogued most of that already, so I felt no qualms about indulging my curiosity in reading further. There were several more letters in the same hand. Anna’s lover had been an excellent stylist, wry and observant without being condescending. There were deft anecdotes about the Colonel and several members of his circle. After so long immersed in the man’s papers, I felt almost as if I knew him. The writer had known him as well, and drawn a portrait which agreed with and illuminated, my own, capturing his sincerity and good nature alongside his bumbling, oblivious pomposity.

There was also a good deal of explicit detail. The letters were not lewd, but the writer had been unashamed of her desires, and, it appeared, quite inventive about them. In person, I am easily embarrassed, but I am not prudish about writing. I have read the parts of Aristophanes for which the glosses are in Latin, and the parts of Catullus for which they are in French. But if such things do not shock me, neither am I drawn to them. I read dispassionately through the file, searching for information about the identity of Anna’s correspondent or the course of their relationship. Though I took careful notes for further study, I found no obvious hints. Perhaps wary of the Colonel, the writer had signed her missives with a quick, graceful flourish that no amount of staring could quite make into an initial.

Sighing, I returned to the beginning of the correspondence, and I was still deeply immersed in it when Miss Coburn went by on her way out of the building.

“Shall I leave the hall light on for you, Mr. Booth?” she called, and I realized suddenly that it was six o’clock. I had not examined the Venetian glass goblet I had promised Mr. Sullivan I would look at the day before, nor the small mammalian skull found among the ritual implements of that unpleasant man Otis Letourneau. Nor had I had lunch, or even coffee. I shook my head.

“No, I… I’ll go home.”

We walked in silence nearly to the museum steps, where Miss Coburn turned and asked me whether I was working on something particularly interesting. I suspected she had noticed the exhaustion I was myself only beginning to feel, but evading the question could only have compounded the awkwardness.

“There were, er, a packet of letters with Colonel Hart’s papers. Addressed to his, er, daughter, Anna.”  
“The one who died.”  
“Yes. They were, that is, they were rather...”

Miss Coburn burst into laughter.

“Was she having an affair?” I nodded, feeling myself blush. I am pale of complexion, and I was sure that my embarrassment was obvious despite the rapidly falling dusk.  
“That isn’t why… I wasn’t, er, reading those parts of…”  
“I didn’t think so, Mr. Booth.” Her lips curved wryly. But seeing my consternation, she restrained herself.  
“Shall I ask my aunts about her, Mr. Booth? I’m sure they’d know, if anyone still does.”

I nodded. Miss Coburn’s aunts could have written an encyclopedia of gossip and scandal.  
“Thank you. That would… that would be very helpful.”

It was not until she wished me good night and walked rapidly off into the twilight that I realized what I had actually been doing all afternoon. I had been reading exactly _those_ parts of the letters. I had read them over and over again. I remembered the incomprehensible avidity with which I had devoured them, and shuddered.

* * *

I ate hurriedly, and with little relish. I had decided as I walked home that I would do no more research that night. I meant to take down something soothing and familiar, within which I could immerse myself until I forgot that discomfiting conversation with Miss Coburn and the strangeness of my afternoon. I thought for a second before selecting Remiger’s Divine Comedy and drawing up my chair before the fire to read.

Quentin Remiger died young, by his own hand; his translation ends in Purgatory. But it is a mournful and comforting book, and I know its first lines as surely as I know my own name: the pilgrim wandering in a wood of shadows, the straight path lost.

I did not realize until the second stanza that I was remembering the words without actually reading them. As I scanned the page, the letters swam fuzzily in my vision, as if set just beyond the plane of focus. Their shapes were maddeningly familiar, and I could make out the divisions between words, but try as I might I could not resolve them. The larger print of the title page was no better, nor was it a peculiarity of the Comedy; I flipped through five or six other texts in panicky haste before I could force myself to accept the obvious. I had lost the ability to read.

I had scarce comprehended that horror than my eager mind began to augment it with others. Might I be going blind? Or could it be brain-fever? Did strokes begin like this? I lay on the bed in despair, and it was some minutes before the saner part of myself pointed out that the room had not faded or blurred, and that peculiarities of vision could be caused by more innocuous conditions: migraine headache, for instance, or eyestrain. There are several medical works in my bookcase, and I thought of consulting one of them before realizing that of course I could not.

It was, I think, my appreciation of this black jest that restored me sufficiently to put on coat and shoes and go out again. I walked for about an hour, with no fixed route or purpose except to avoid lit lamps and legible signs. At one point I came suddenly upon the river, its surface smooth and reflective like black-glazed earthenware, and I walked along it for a while, feeling the faint, chill breeze that rose from its surface like an expectation of snow. At the Selwyn Street bridge I stopped to look up at the sky. It was a clear night, and by childhood reflex I tried to find the Bears and search out the dim north star. But though the stars themselves were perfectly visible, the constellations were lost to me. No amount of effort would connect those bright and distant points into figures, and as I persisted, they whirled around me like floating candles carried suddenly over a waterfall. I grasped blindly for the bridge railing, wondering for a horrible second if I had missed it and was falling unstoppably toward the rough granite walkway, and when I found it, I clutched it as a child clutches its parent’s hand.

* * *

I knew I would not sleep, but I tried anyway. The hours bled into one another. I recited poetry to myself that I had known, or thought I had known, and found my memory full of holes, as if moths had been at it in the dark. Too slowly, the sky paled towards dawn. I rose very early, changed my clothes and went to work again.

That I still had work I could do is a testament not so much to the breadth of my talents but to my colleagues’ habit of foisting upon me any problems they considered “occult” or macabre. Most of these were in fact quite commonplace. The Venetian goblet was a finely executed piece that might look quite striking on display. But the “faceless angel” design about which Mr. Sullivan had consulted me was simply a dove, partly obscured by a smear which I carefully removed with a damp cloth and vinegar.

Mr. Letorneau was indisputably an occultist, but a bad one. The skull from his desk had belonged to either a weasel or a polecat, and suggested to me that its owner had relied overmuch on Eli Whittaker’s redaction of Albertus Magnus. Whittaker’s glosses were abysmal to begin with, but had been further mauled by the typesetter; the rituals he described were of no scholarly interest.

I wrote brief reports on each of these tasks. I could write, or seem to, if I did not watch myself doing it. But whether I had written what I meant to, I could not tell; my script was as alien to me as Hittite. I delivered the note to Mr. Sullivan by hand.

“Could you, er… would it be possible to read it now?”  
“Certainly,” he replied. “Was there an angel after all?”  
“No, nothing like that. There wasn’t… I’d just like you to read it.” I trailed off lamely.  
Mr. Sullivan skimmed rapidly over the note and nodded at me as if satisfied.  
“Well, if there wasn’t one, there wasn’t, Mr. Booth.”  
“But was the note, er… you could read it?”  
“Didn’t I just do that?” he asked, puzzled. I thanked him haltingly and fled.

It was now about ten o’clock, and although my desk was piled with several days’ work, in my present state I could do none of it. I spent the next hour fidgeting with my penknife and rearranging piles of paper on my floor at random. I suspected that I should look at Anna Hart’s letters again, and did not want to.

* * *

I could read them. “You will not go blind,” I thought to myself, and felt a tension go out of me that I only then realized had been there. But behind the relief I felt a deeper compulsion. I wanted to glut myself on those words, to lose myself within them, to set myself aside and be the thing they had called back from the grave. To read and read and reread them. “Put them down,” I thought, and could not, and turned over another sheet and another, my fingers clenching around them so tightly that my wrists ached. The old scar on my left arm flared suddenly with pain, and my gaze dropped from the page as I clutched at it. With that, the spell was broken; I stood back from my desk, averting my eyes as if from the severed head of Medusa.

It was then that Miss Coburn knocked on my door. Though I wanted nothing more than to sit in solitude, I could still feel myself drawn to those damnable letters, and I feared I would be unable to resist a second time. I opened it.

“I asked my aunts, Mr. Booth, and do you know what they---” she broke off. “Is something wrong?”  
“I… can tell you later. I’d very much like to hear what your aunts remembered.”  
“Are you sure?”  
“Quite sure.”  
“There was no young man they could think of,” she said. “I thought they’d finally disappointed me when I heard that. I thought Aunt Ferdy could remember every scrap of scandal she’d ever run across, back to Ham and Noah. But it turned out I was lacking imagination--- the real scandal was even better. Now, what do you think they told me, Mr. Booth?”  
“It was a woman.”  
“It was a--- you knew all along, didn’t you?”  
“The letters were quite, er… Well. What I can’t find out is, which woman?”  
“In some ways, Booth, you really are very difficult to shock.”  
She smiled, then considered.  
“If that’s not what’s bothering you, though… Tell me, is this strictly an archival matter?”  
I looked at her; she looked back steadily, reading something in my eyes that I could not bring myself to speak out loud.  
“Would you like me to burn them?” she asked.  
“I don’t think… It wouldn’t help.”  
“But the woman might? Well, you’re in luck, then. She’s still alive.”

* * *

I had not heard of Constance Ellicott before, or not by that name; she was C. R. Ellicott, the historian. I had always thought Ellicott was a man, and Miss Coburn looked at me sternly for a second when I admitted as much. But the similarity was clear once pointed out; thirty years had transformed those brief sketches from the letters into careful, scholarly portraits, but underneath was still that same knowing wryness.

It was not far to her house. Miss Coburn insisted on coming, and on taking the letters. I did not object. I knew I could not have carried them myself.

Miss Ellicott was a short, fine-boned woman, spare and elegant, like the parlor she asked us into. Her companion, a Miss Tisdale, greeted us politely and made herself scarce like a shy cat in the presence of strangers.  
“Anna Hart,” she mused. “And why do you ask me, in particular?”  
“There were… er, I found some letters in Colonel Hart’s papers, and I, er, addressed to Miss Hart, which, you see…”  
“They were of a delicate nature.” Miss Coburn supplied the euphemism in a tone of voice that suggested audible italics.  
“I see. And what---”  
“Did you, er...” I could see no other way. “Did you write them?”  
“I have a great many friends and relations in this city, Mr. Booth, and some slight reputation as a historian. You will understand that a women in my position could not have written any such thing.”  
I glanced at Miss Coburn.  
“We… we understand. But can we still ask you about Miss Hart in more general terms? What kind of person was she?”  
“She was seventeen.” Miss Ellicott’s voice softened. “She was beautiful and greedy and cheerful and very quick to anger and she was silly in all the best ways and most of the worst. Every--- all the young men were in love with her, you understand. And she was a shameless flirt. But I think she only really cared for… a certain person who wrote her letters, yes?”  
“And that person?”  
“Well, Mr. Booth, you have read the letters, after all. What do you think?”  
“I think they were in love,” I said.  
“You think so?”  
“I am... quite sure, yes.” I could feel the dead girl’s desire, like an ache in my temples, a throbbing in the back of my throat. I wanted--- she wanted--- to touch Miss Ellicott, to read the letters to her, to read them, read them, pick them up and read.  
“Well,” said Miss Ellicott, and sighed. “They may have been, at that. What of it, though? Anna Hart is dead and mostly forgotten, and perhaps the letters should be too.”  
“I thought. That, er, you might want them. To give to… that person.”  
“And if I no longer know that person?”  
“But---” and the pain broke into my voice--- “but she’s in my head!”  
Miss Coburn turned. “She what?”  
My hands trembled, and I clutched one with the other, squeezing until it ached. I looked from Miss Ellicott to the Miss Coburn and back.  
“What Mr. Booth means is…” Miss Coburn broke in. “Figuratively speaking, one could---”  
“Spare us.” Miss Ellicott’s voice was dry. “I’ve heard all kinds of strange stories, and the strangest of all were the ones that turned out to be true.”  
“I can’t read,” I said. “She took my--- I can’t read anything but those.”  
I looked at Miss Coburn. I could tell, when I looked at her, exactly which compartment of her handbag the letters were in.  
“She can’t let go, I think. She’s still in love, and she remembers, and she wants---”  
“I don’t care what she wants,” said Constance Ellicott. She was angry, and for a second I thought of Mrs. Siddons, and cringed.  
“She had no right! Whether it was love or some passing schoolgirl fancy, it was thirty years ago.”  
My headache intensified. I could feel Anna’s desire and her loss, like a tiny sun glaring in the very center of my brain.  
“Besides.” Miss Ellicott grinned wickedly. “I’m fifty-three years old, and I--- a certain--- oh, you’ve known all along anyway. Just don’t go telling my cousins. But I haven’t exactly pined away, these thirty years.”  
“I--- she--- you have to---”  
“Give me your hand, Mr. Booth.”  
I did not want to reach out, and did.  
“Let him go, Anna dearest. It’s done,” she said. The pain worsened. Jagged slashes ran across my vision like rips in a screen, behind which hot bright pain shone through.  
“I apologize, Mr. Booth,” she said, and lowered her head towards mine. _I do not kiss people_ , I thought, and then her lips, dry and papery but so very warm. The slashes widened, and the screen broke, and I fell through searing, intolerable light as Anna Hart left me.

* * *

The room I woke in was more comfortable than the parlor. I was lying on a sofa, with a patchwork quilt laid over me. I struggled and tried to sit up.  
“Lie still a while longer,” said a voice from behind me. I thought it was Miss Tisdale’s; this soft, homely room must be hers, as the spartan parlor was Miss Ellicott’s. I lay back. I could not have gotten up in any event; I was dizzy and weak. There was something I should be worried about, I thought, and my hands twitched under the quilt as I tried to remember.

“Don’t tire him, dear,” Miss Tisdale said, and Miss Coburn said something in reply I couldn’t quite make out.  
“Look at this, Booth,” she said, “and see if it makes any sense to you.”

She held open a book in front of me. I propped myself up a few inches and focused, haltingly, at the top of the page. There were letters there, and then words, and a sentence, and then she lifted it away.

“He’ll be all right,” I heard her say, and I thought of my office bookshelves, of my notes and files, of Remiger’s Inferno lying on my bedside table, and realized I would be. I lay back again and let the darkness take me.

**Author's Note:**

> My beta reader called this a "lesbian pornography demon headache story". This is, unfortunately, quite true. There is not much else to say about it.


End file.
